The Crockett Lab

we study human morality in the lab and in the wild.

The philosopher Blaise Pascal described human beings as “the glory and scum of the universe”. Each of us carries blueprints for an astonishing range of social behaviors, from the heroic to the atrocious. We seek to understand this paradox by studying the cognitive building blocks of human morality, including social learning, impression formation, empathy, moral judgment and decision-making. Our approach integrates methods and insights from social psychology, behavioral economics, computational neuroscience and philosophy. We use behavioral experiments, computational modeling, functional brain imaging, field studies and "big data" analyses to investigate the social mind.

We are currently located in the the Department of Psychology, Yale University. Yale undergraduates who are interested in getting involved with our research can find out more here. Prospective graduate students who are interested in applying to our program to start in Fall 2020 can find out more here.